Human Hand: Kinematics, Statics and Dynamics

Porto, the institutional repository of the Politecnico di Torino, is provided by the University Library and the IT-Services. The aim is to enable open access to all the world. Please share with us how this access benefits you. Your story matters. The human hand is an extremely complex system due to its large number of degrees of freedom (DoF) within a significantly reduced space. Moreover, it is required for most of the tasks performed by humans. That is why it is necessary to understand deeply all the characteristics of the human hand in order to develop devices interacting with it: to support it, to substitute injured parts, to help the recovery from injuries, or to enhance the performances while preserving its natural level of dexterity. The aim of this paper is to provide a complete and exhaustive summary of the kinematic, static and dynamic characteristics of the human hand as a preliminary step towards the development of hand devices such as prosthetic/robotic hands and exoskeletons. Both fields provide promising opportunities in research and space applications; the former through humanoid robotic helpers (e.g., Eurobot, Robonaut), the latter through the rising necessity to help the astronauts during Extravehicular Activity (EVA). In literature, several papers can be found analyzing kinematics, workspace, constraints and forces of the human hand 2,4. However this information is scattered among several papers, regarding in particular the exerted forces and the dependencies of joint forces and velocities from the angular values of the same joint or the adjacent one. Direct and inverse kinematics are presented for all the fingers and the data related to maximum forces, velocities, acceleration for each joint of each finger has been collected and is presented in this work.